http://www.speedtest.net/result/2496920967.png I'm with Sky but was told by BT that the problem is that we are as far from the phone exchange as you can get which is why the speed is slow. Is this a load of crap?
I am with Orange and have had slow broadband for several years (around 650k against at least 2M promised) Same excuse- too far from the exchange. I persisted and Orange got BT to investigate. The BT engineers were very revealing and helpful. They changed the pair in the cable to the end of the road. This gave a small improvement, but not much. More hassling of Orange (from whom I rent the BT line) and BT returned, this time they changed the pair to the exchange. Instant improvement to around 4Meg; except between 0900 and 1015 each week day. It is significant that whilst BT, who own the lines, guarantee to mesintain their speeds, Orange don't guarantee any particular speed. To me non BT customers suffer at times of high demand so that BT maintain their customers speeds.
I have the 100mb with virgin too and get similar results to daveybm above, that speedtest site is not always entirley 100% accurate though as there are a lot of variables that can effect the result, such as time of day and the server you are testing on etc... but overall I have always been on cable broadband since they first introduced it back in the 512kb days, I would never even think about going down the dsl route. I know BT do fibre optic like virgin now too but I have not tried them so couldn't comment on how reliable it is, however, the cable from ntl/virgin has always been solid as a rock, even if it costs a bit more to stick with virgin I would happily pay the extra.